That sounds like it could have been the plot of a pretty good episode.
How come the Starfleet commanders get to sit in comfy chairs, while the Klingon officers have to stand up? And, despite the advanced technology, both ships have electrical fires after attacked-didn’t they have circuit breakers?
Well…let’s just say that intoxicants were involved, of excellent quality and generous quantity, at the time the notion was formed, and the overall atmosphere was not one suitable for much in the way of critical thinking.
They can cook torpedoes while cloaked (that’s clearly how the Romulans were fighting in the episode, after all) but the power drain of that and the cloak doesn’t leave a lot for anything else (like keeping the shields up and maintaining a decent speed so you can be where you need to be to “surface” and attack effectively).
My impression was that whoever shot first had the upper hand. In multiple ship conflicts, whoever could get the most shots off before the other would win (“Shields now at 10% Captain! We canna take any more!”) Therefore, it would seem logical to me that nearly every ship in the ST universe was equal to every other ship, as most conflicts were standoffs. Also, because whoever shot first had the upper hand, that made cloaking technology especially formidable as whoever had the cloak decided who gets to shoot first (and if a conflict would even occur.)
The canon is murky, but in at least one episode, the Klingons go out of their way to explain to a Federation guest that they (Klingons) don’t use mattresses, either.
Which was based on a pretty good movie.
That’s because the Klingons discovered that not only did Mattresses come from Squornshelus Zeta, but it was also the Tribble Homeworld, so of course, it HAD to go…
For the good of The Empire!
Thlingon Hol!
I still have my “Booklet of General Plans” (blue prints) for the dreadnaught in a box someplace.
Perhaps the circuit breakers are why all they have are small fires instead of the entire compartment being incinerated.
But first, the tranya.
I relish tranya.
In Star Trek III, when Enterprise and the Bird of Prey are facing each other down, the Klingon commander (Christopher Lloyd) expresses amazement that the Enterprise doesn’t blow him away; “they outgun us ten to one!” It’s because they don’t just light him up that he realizes there’s something amiss with Enterprise.
In the Next Generation series, in the episode where an alien wiped the crew’s memory and convinces them to help destroy an enemy race, the crew has to actually look up the ship’s armament. As he reads off Enterprise-D’s weapons, Riker notes with no small amount of impress, “We’re on a battleship.”
Within the show and movies it’s quite clear Enterprise is a capital warship. Whatever Gene Roddenberry and the Federation claim its purpose is, it is always presented as being a warship of substantially more than average size. Basically, there are bigger ships out there, but the great majority of ships are smaller.
I always thought that, althought Kirk’s Enterprise was called a heavy cruiser, it was really something more akin to the old battle-cruiser concept. Enterprise was meant to operate on its own for extended periods, deal out a heavy punch to pretty much anything it ran across, and run like hell from anything it couldn’t kill - and it would need to run, because it wasn’t all that heavily shielded. That’s what battle-cruisers are for. Powerful ships, but with absolutely no place in a full-fledged battle. (See: HMS Hood).
I think it was a mistake to make Enterprise more powerful in TNG. To put the crew in danger, you had to have bigger and uglier bad guys.
But regarding the OP; I think NCC 1701 was equivalent to a Battle Cruiser and about equal to Romulan and Klingon adversaries. Of course in The Search for Spock Krug commands and smaller class vessel.
In the SFB universe, there was this beast called a Dreadnought. Note the saucer section has its own warp drive, thus you could separate the ship if necessary and have them fight individually.
Since Romulans and Klingons come from a common ancestor, and that fact the Federation was at war with (but would later become friends with) the Klingon Empire,
I would say the Klingons are West Germany and the Romulans East Germany.
Cite?
I thought that the Romulans and the Vulcans shared a common ancestor.
Though the Vulcans = W. Germany actually works in a way. I don’t see the Romulans necessarily filling the role of Germany in a political sense, however.
Originally, the Klingons & Federation only ceased fighting because there was another force that was more powerful than both of them. At the time, they never liked each other. TNG premiered in the late 1980s, when it was more clear that the US & USSR would soften relations, so it made sense to have them allied.
“The Undiscovered Country” makes reference to the Klingons being German (Shakespeare is “much better in the original Klingon”), but that was probably a reference to the language, not the people.
It’s not like the allegory had to be direct. Klingons could be politically Russian, but culturally German as Roddenberry imagined them.
Back to the OP, I thought the Enterprise seemed to be less ‘maneuverable’ than the ships it went up against. In order to fire its weapons effectively, they always had to either wait or get into proper position, all while taking multiple hits from the enemy. This is probably for dramatic reasons, but it was my impression. You could also say this was Kirk’s style - not to waste energy on fighting until you were certain of hitting your target, and hitting it hard.
Doh! Romulans and VULCANS…yeah, that’s what I meant…:smack: